Gideon's Bargain (4 page)

Chapter Five

Sarah didn't know how long they lay there and wasn't certain she cared. Her body felt limp with an exhaustion she'd never experienced, yet every boneless inch of her seemed gloriously energized. She shifted on a sigh, muscles flexing beneath the heavy weight of her husband's body.
Gideon's chest pressed against her back, warm and rough beneath a shirt she didn't remember him opening, and his mouth caressed her ear. "I gave you what you wanted, Sarah. I granted your request." His hips flexed, thrusting his still-hard cock within her sensitized pussy, making her moan and shudder. "Wherever are your manners?"
She heard his words, but their meaning was slow to penetrate through her foggy hold on consciousness. "Hmm?"
"Your manners, Sarah." His tongue darted out, flicked the tender lobe of her ear,
stroked
the graceful curve, dipped inside. "It's only polite to acknowledge a favor done."
She stiffened like cold stone, a whimper escaping when the motion sent her pussy contracting around his invading cock. Surely he could not be implying that she ought to thank him for this game he played? She gritted her teeth against sensation, blocking out the brush of his lips against the column of her neck, the clasp of teeth around pale skin. "Is this no favor to you?"
He chuckled. "This is your lesson, Sarah. Not mine. You are the student here and I the teacher." She felt his lips press, tongue sweep,
then
the quick burn of pressure as he sucked her skin against his teeth to mark her. "I am not the one who wanted to learn control."
Bastard. She grunted and tried to twist away. Even the feel of his cock filling her with such wicked, delicious sensations could not balance out the arrogance of his attitude. "The only control I have yet encountered is yours, my lord. Perhaps I need to find a better teacher."
He held her pinned beneath the weight of his body and chuckled low into her ear. "It is too late for that, my dear. Much too late indeed. I am the only teacher you have, and this is the only lesson you will receive. No protest. No second chances. No regrets."
All the anger she'd though dissipated by her climax flooded back to her, hotter and stronger than before, as if their primitive mating had fed rather than resolved it. The fury exploded within her, a volcanic rage she had not known she harbored in her calm and collected breast. It hit with the force of Vesuvius, and Gideon its unfortunate
Pompeii
.
"God damn you!" She screamed, throwing her head back until her skull impacted with his face. The blow stunned him, his grip loosening. It disappeared when she bucked like a wild mare beneath him. As soon as she felt his body lift away, she lunged from the bed, not away from him but toward him, launching herself at him in a torrent of blows and shrieks and violent kicks. "Fuck you, my lord, and your lessons and your title and your marriage! Fuck the bloody lot of you! You're just like the rest of them! Same frigging liars and cheats and twice-damned hypocrites they all are. I knew better than to listen to the likes of you, and look what happened. You've shown your stripes, and like a skunk masquerading as a housecat, I know you by your stink!"
She struck and beat and screamed and sobbed and used language she had never been meant to overhear, much less to use. Her rage blinded her, a force she'd never encountered. She didn't know if it lasted minutes or hours, but when it finally began to ebb, it felt like decades.
She found herself puddled on the floor, a limp damp mass of sweat and sex and tangled hair with her stockings sagging around her knees and her breath broken in her chest. But her husband knelt beside her, cradling her bent body in his own, stroking those tangles and soothing her like a colicky infant.
"Hush now." She heard his murmur, deep and rumbling and it confused her. "Hush, my love. There's a girl. Go on and cry, darling. You need a good cry after all this."
She hiccupped, the embarrassing sound making her weep harder, and several minutes passed before she again attempted to speak.
"H-how-how dare you," she sobbed. "How dare you try to comfort me. As if you aren't the one who did this to me. As if you aren't more foul than any of them! At least they never pretended. They never told me I could have something I couldn't. They never dangled my freedom before me like a carrot only to snatch it away again just as I had begun to believe." Her eyes might be sore and swollen from crying, but she could still glare at him in hurt and betrayal. "That makes you a worse monster than they are, my lord, and I hope you rot in hell."
She heard his chuckled, this time not mocking, but genuinely amused and she wanted to rail anew, but exhaustion had claimed her. She had given her last volley and now she just wanted to curl into a little ball and sleep until she could forget she had ever had such a ridiculous dream as independence in a world that kept its women in so tight a bondage.
"No doubt you'll get your wish, love, but not just yet." Gideon scooped her up in his arms and carried her the few steps back to the bed. He set her briefly on her feet, but all Sarah could manage to do was cling to his shirt while he pulled the blankets down and rearranged the pillows into a comfortable bolster. Then he lifted her again and settled her between the cool linen sheets.
She curled into the softness, eyes closed, muscles limp, praying for sleep to claim her quickly. She didn't even both to protest when she hear the rustle of clothing and felt the bed dip as Gideon slid in beside her. She ignored the gentle fingers he used to brush her hair away from her cheek and kept her eyes closed.
"I don't suppose you feel any better, but I do." The bed creaked as he shifted his weight, and she tensed when he pressed close, his arm draping over her waist and rubbing soothing circles over her back. "I think we'll get on quite well now."
Shock opened her eyes against her will, and she stared at him, aghast. "Get on? You think we'll get on now that I've said out loud-screamed out loud!-how much I hate you? Are you mad?"
He grinned. "Perhaps, but not for this reason." He dragged her closer to him and tangled his legs with hers, taking advantage while she was too stunned to protest. "And you never said you hate me. You just lumped me in with all the men you do hate. Who, I should hazard a guess, fully deserve your loathing."
She blinked, the fog of sex and anger and despair beginning to clear. "You think men deserve my hatred?"
His eyebrow quirked, a gesture she had once loathed as mocking, but now almost charmed her. As if he had a joke he wanted her to share. "I think some men do, the ones in your family being at the top of the list."
"But you do not."
"I should hope not. I intend to do my best to make you very happy, wife. We've too many years ahead of us to spend them in a misery."
The axis of Sarah's world had shifted, and she found that her balance suffered for it. "I don't understand," she said, brow furrowed, mouth agape. "What of all that you said about being obedient and docile and giving in to your dark urges? What was that about?"
He chuckled, a rich, sweet sound of beginning, like morning chocolate. "Lies, I'm afraid. Or, perhaps games would be a better term. They are ones I've played before and wouldn't mind playing with you, if you've a mind now that you know they're not real." His hand stroked over the curve of her shoulder and down to cuddle the weight of her breast in his palm. She wriggled away. "So long as you give in to my light urges, Sarah, the dark ones can go hang."
"You were pretending!" she sat bolt upright in her bed, clutched the blankets to her like a shield. "Was it amusing to do that to me? To make me believe you wanted to…you are despicable."
"No, Sarah, merely desperate." He expression had gone grave, like his tone, and he gazed up at her through deep, black eyes that glinted now not with humor or lust or mocking cruelty, but with sincerity. "I spent the better part of a month since arranging our betrothal trying to contact you, but your father would have none of it. I was to stay away from you, he said, until the wedding." His mouth twisted. "If I had not seen you lurking behind a corner on one of my visits, I would have thought he hid some gross deformity of yours. But I knew you to be lovely, and I knew your father to be the worst sort of man. So I was forced to bide my time until today. Only in the church and at the lunch, it was not your father who thwarted my attempts to know you, it was you yourself."
"You lie. I wanted nothing more than for you to notice me during the ceremony, yet you spent the day ignoring me!"
"That is not so, Sarah. Every time I thought we might share a word together, your drunkard father or wastrel brother would butt his filthy head in and send you scuttling back into your shell."
Sarah stiffened, remembering. He was right. She had noticed Richard bumbling along through the morning in his usual half-drunken state, getting in the way time and again as she wished for a husband who would see her.
"Then what sort of game did you play tonight?" she demanded, feeling herself soften, but still wanting answers. "If you wanted to know me, why did you not try speaking with me, or…or telling me what you're telling me now? Why was it necessary to humiliate me?"
"That shell, Sarah, was blasted hard to crack." He lifted a hand, skimmed it along her jaw, and she felt no desire to slap it away. "Every time your brother or your father interrupted, you went further and further away. You never spoke. I wondered if you had gone mute until you arrived here and I overheard you telling your maid you believed me to be the same sort of man as your relatives. You had me tarred and feathered, my dear, and I knew it would take some drastic action to clear the air."
She snorted, but her fingers began to relax on the coverlet. "As in a lightening strike."
Gideon grinned. "It worked, didn't it?" He tugged her down to the pillows beside him. "I wanted to find out where that shell came from, what it was you wanted to fiercely you had to conceal it from the world. And you gave the strong impression that asking flat out would not yield a usable answer."
She pursed her lips and looked away.
"Hmm. As I thought." He gave her a mockingly stern glare. "I decided that if I pretended to be the demon you thought I was, I might be able to elicit the truth more quickly."
"Then you aren't the evil, cruel master seeking to bend me to his will?" She reached out, circling a slender finger around his flat, male nipple, the first time she had voluntarily touched him. This time, she did not tremble, though she felt her pussy soften and dampen.
He slid his hand to her bottom and squeezed, and his mouth curved in a slow and wicked smile. "I can be, if you enjoy the idea."
She shrugged and cuddled closer. "I'm not at all sure what I enjoy, my lord, for I've only known what you showed me this evening."
He lowered his smiling mouth to her breast, sipped delicately from the peak, and felt her shiver. "That did seem to make an impression."
"Oh, yes." She sighed and buried her fingers in his hair, lightly cradling his head against her. The feel of his hot mouth on her sensitive nipple brought that faint, quivery feeling back in force. "Quite an impression."
"Then it might be worth repeating." His mouth shifted to the other breast while his hand burrowed beneath the blankets and between their bodies to tease her thighs apart. She acquiesced willingly and murmured her pleasure when he brushed his fingers with great gentleness over her swollen and tender pussy. "But before we make such a hasty decision…"
He wrapped his large hand around her thigh and guided her leg atop his, leaving her open and willing in front of him.
"…we might want to consider some other options."
His hips pressed forward, his cock easing past her snug entrance and coaxing her sensitive pussy to accommodate his hard length.
Sarah gasped, her breath catching in her throat, her head falling forward to press against his shoulder as the feelings once more overwhelmed her. "What other options-oh!-should we consider, my lord?"
"Mm." He murmured his pleasure as her hips pressed toward him, encouraging his thrusts, but he continued to move slowly inside her, thrusts shallow and easy on her newly-torn flesh. "We have limitless options, love. We can try slow and easy, sweet and tender, quick and joyful. We can do anything we choose."
"Anything we choose." Sarah repeated his words and rolled them about in her mind, enjoying the sound. For the first time in her life, she believed her choice would indeed matter. And she believed that just this first time, she would enjoy letting her husband decide. "You are the expert, my lord. Perhaps if you showed me each of these options, I could make a more informed decision."
He grinned, a flash of white teeth in the dimly lit chamber. "As you wish, my love. But first you must call me by my name."
He eased his hips forward, and she found his name fell naturally from her lips. "Gideon."
"Ah, perfect. Now let us begin. Though I warn you this may take some time. As I said, the possibilities are endless."
"I don't mind. It is a wife's duty to stay close to her husband."